Trump Day One is TNA’s new day as...

Trump Day One is TNA’s new day as well

If you’re going to watch one thing today, it should be the inauguration. Regardless of who you wanted to be President, today is a special day for America and should be celebrated, even if only for the end of the Obama regime.

If you’re going to watch two things today, keep your eye on The New Americana. We’re making big changes, many of which are already visible on the site. Before I go into details about what’s changing, it’s important to know why we’re doing it and who we are.

There were two dominant camps in the media throughout the campaign cycle. The first was the leftist side which accounts for the bulk of mainstream media. The other was the pro-Trump side with sites like Breitbart and Drudge using their tremendous clout to sway primary Republican voters towards their guy. We build TNA last year to be a true conservative news aggregator that highlighted small-government, freedom-loving principles in the form of stories. Like Drudge, we wanted to draw attention to various articles across the internet every day that patriots needed to read. So far, that portion of the mission has been going wonderfully.

The other side of our mission hasn’t been moving very quickly. Initially, we were looking at this project as a labor of love. The site exploded in popularity and it became clear that we needed to generate revenue in order to bring on writers and promote the site through social media. Unfortunately, monetizing website traffic has never been my cup of tea. We’ve had mild success with everything that we’ve tried. Now, we’re looking for more.

We should note that this is NOT a non-profit, but it’s definitely not being done for profit, either. At some point in the future, we may file to become a non-profit, but for now we’re simply redirecting all funds generated by the site into making it better. Personally, I’m very much in the hole with the site, but I’m not complaining. I’m blessed to have the means to get it started. Now, it’s time to take it to the next level.

Here are some of the changes you’ll notice in the coming days:

Authors’ Names

Before fatherhood forced me to get into advertising, I went to school for journalism. My dream was to someday convert a New York Times or Washington Post into a conservative publications as their editor-in-chief, but alas, life happened.

My appreciation for good journalists has become more acute in recent years because their numbers are dwindling. It’s hard to find reporters and commentators who share the values our audience appreciates, so it’s important for us to highlight them whenever we can. As such, we’re adding the authors’ names to the links so you can get to know who you like.

Tweets

This is an experiment. It’s a pain, so if it’s not successful, we’ll cut it off very quickly. We’re putting little Tweet links next to many of our links. This is for two reasons. First, these stories are often important enough that they should be shared to your friends. The conservative movement is being usurped in many ways. The more we share, the more educated we can help our friends to become.

The second reason is self-serving. All of the links include a mention that they were found on this site. It also alerts the author and sometimes the publication itself with the hopes that they’ll share some of the links you Tweet at them. This gives TNA more exposure and draws attention to us as a “new player” in the news aggregation world. If you are active on Twitter and find stories that you like, simply click the “Tweet” link next to the author’s name and it will pop up what you’ll need to help spread the word.

Update: Apparently, the Tweet button isn’t very popular. We had less than 1% of our visitors use the links. Considering how much is slows us down, we’re abandoning this feature quickly.

Higher Quality

You may or may not see a slight decrease in the number of links we post daily. At this point, we’re not sure if we’ll be able to vet out as many stories as we did before because we’re now trying to read every single thing that we post. In the past, we would often post links from trusted authors or sites with the headlines that appealed. Now, we’re reading through all of them.

The goal is to make sure that every link we put up is interesting enough to be worth sharing. There’s no reason for us to share links we don’t read and we know you wouldn’t expect us to. Therefore, we won’t.

Advertising

You’ll be seeing different types of advertisements on the site. We’re currently looking for direct sponsors. In the meantime, we’re going to try out Taboola, a platform used by many conservative sites across the web.

We do not control what ads are served, so we’re relying on you to help us. If you see something that you feel shouldn’t be on the site because it’s inappropriate or off message, please screenshot it and email it to me: jdrucker@reagan.com. I had a friend tell me the other day that one of our ad servers plopped a Planned Parenthood ad on the site. Needless to say that ad server was discontinued immediately.

Also, we’ve moved the Amazon portion closer to the top and we’re turning it into something fun. We’re selecting “cool” items we find on Amazon to have a daily list of links. Keep something in mind: anything you buy from Amazon after following one of those links gives us a little financial support. You don’t have to buy our recommended hot sauce if you don’t want to. Just click it, then do your normal search on Amazon. If you’re going to shop Amazon, please visit TNA and click through to Amazon through one of our links located in blue close to the top of the page. It doesn’t increase your cost but does help us to get our hosting, promotions, and writers paid.

New Beginnings

Today is a dawning for America. Some are pumped. Others are terrified. As Trump starts his push, we’ll be there to praise DC when they do well and oppose them when they turn to the left. Our only real bias is that we’re pro-America.